How Multiplayer Kinect Dancing Works

Dance Central has multiplayer. It’s no Kinect Adventures multiplayer where you’d be standing side by side, in a gesture vs gesture frenzy. No. It does dance battles. You take turns.

I chickened out of participating in a two-player Dance Central dance battle last week at MTV’s offices, but, hey, I get it. Dance Central multiplayer starts up a song, expects one player to dance along to it, matching moves to score points, and then switches to a silhouetted freestyle mode as one player steps off and the other steps in. Player two dances the next part, racking up points, and then they trade off again. You can’t pick your character; the same onscreen character dances the whole song through. Only the people the Kinect is capturing changes.

So don’t picture some sort of co-op multiplayer waltz or even team-scored line-dancing. If you want to play Dance Central with friends, you’ll be stepping in and stepping off, like a breakdancing battle. Some may chicken out and stay on the couch. Like me!